Should Your Retail Business Rely on Your Own Ecommerce Site or Use Existing Sales Platforms?
When you want to sell your products online, there is no doubt that having your own online store can be highly beneficial. You can promote yourself, advertise and direct people to your own site, and manage all of your transactions within one platform.
However, is there any benefit to also selling your products on other popular online platforms as well?
Reaching A Wider Audience
While you may have a very good marketing strategy for your products, and be leveraging things like social media and search engine marketing, chances are you won’t have anything close to the kind of market coverage you really want.
When you also sell on well known sites like Etsy, eBay and Craigslist, you have far more access to people who want to buy the kind of stuff you sell. You can also benefit from people using third party sites like zoomthelist.com, which shows results from all of Craigslist to people who are searching for specific things.
This can allow you to make contact with a lot of potential customers who otherwise wouldn’t know about your business.
Easy to Manage Sales Channels
Another reason why you may want to advertise and sell on well-known online platforms like Amazon and eBay, is that they do provide all of the tools you need to make selling your products easy to manage and also to make analyzing your sales and return on investment simple.
You may wonder how effective a given marketing strategy is, and while the analytics for your own website tell part of the story, they can’t really tell you why and how someone ended up at your product. With far more advanced analytic tools available to sellers, sites like eBay and Amazon are able to give you a far better indication of how well your marketing is performing.
Reviews for a Wider Audience
Another good thing about using big sales platforms as well as your own site is that when users post reviews, they are available to a much bigger audience. You don’t necessarily need to pay for testimonials or reviews on other sites if your products have been rated highly on a site like Amazon, as this can be enough to persuade people to buy.
This means that the existing customers you have, have a lot more power to influence future sales than they would on your own site. If you can get good reviews on a site like eBay or Etsy, you know that other people will be looking at these when making their own buying decisions.
Having your own site is something of an essential these days if you want to run a retail business, however making good use of other existing platforms can be a big boon.
Big platforms have invested millions in marketing and have brands people already feel attached to, so by selling through them you can get all of that credibility for your own business.
